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Trying new methods with Persian | ||
Tags: Farsi/Persian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| goltrpoat Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5937 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, German Studies: French, Latin | Message 1 of 8 10 July 2008 at 3:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I'll be using this space to document my study of Persian. I haven't tried keeping a study journal before, and it seemed like it'd be a good idea to keep a log since I'm trying out something new.
My attempts at learning languages haven't been terribly fruitful, with the exception of languages I learned by necessity at a much younger age. My attempts at learning just about everything else I've tried, on the other hand, have mostly been quite satisfactory (to me, anyway). I don't believe in innate talent, so the problem lies with methodology. After thinking about it for a bit, I realized that I have trouble with grammar. I have an aversion to memorizing arbitrary rules in isolation. If the public school system almost killed my interest in mathematics, it only makes sense that memorizing tiny chunks of a language by rote would eventually kill my interest in it. This suggests the following method: 1. Start with a textbook of relatively wide scope, I'm using Iraj Bashiri's Persian for Beginners. 2. Go through very large chunks of it, quickly, doing your best to absorb the material, but staying at (or ahead of) a set number of pages a day. Do the exercises, of course. 3. Go back and review -- filling in the holes, but hopefully having somewhat of a bigger picture in doing so. Redo the exercises when needed. My immediate goal is to finish Lesson 8 of Bashiri's book by the end of the month. Taking my time constraints into account, this is very aggressive (it's half the book), but that's the point. That puts me at ten pages a day, leaving some slack to account for days I'm bound to miss. I'm using Anki for vocab (used to use Mnemosyne, but I like the model feature in Anki), and listening to random audio off the net for pronunciation. I don't claim it's going to work for anyone, including me (the vocab, particularly, will probably overwhelm me -- I'll be lucky if I don't hit 300 words after two weeks). Should be an interesting experiment, though. I'm starting out with about 90 words' worth of working vocabulary, and a dash of grammar. I'll hold off on defining mid- and long-term goals until I figure out if any of this works at all. Today was pp.15-25. Learned the following: 1. Comparative: -tær. bozorg = big, bozorg-taer = bigger. Mnemonic: -er in English. Mnemonic #2: beh-taer = better. Superlative: -tærin. No good mnemonic, will try to think of one later. 2. Adjectives are attached by ezafe. Two cases, looks like: a) -ye: if noun ends in an alef or vav, or in a he that's pronounced 'e' b) -e: if noun ends in a consonant, or in a he that's pronounced 'h' 3. Superlatives precede the noun, interestingly: qali-ye geran-tær (expensive carpet), but geran-tærin qali (the most expensive carpet). 4. Abstract nouns can be formed from nouns and adjectives by appending a stressed -i, bit like English -ness. Examples: xub-í is goodness, ab-í is blue (c.f. ab, water). No mnemonic, hopefully I can keep all of these stressed/unstressed -e, -ye, and -i straight. 5. Ezafes can combine simple sentences into compound sentences, but I had already assumed that had to be the case. The exercises were fairly easy, and it's late -- so I skipped quite a few. Tomorrow's ten pages appear to mostly cover material that I already know (possessive and pronouns), but there's a huge amount of new vocab, so that should keep me busy. Edited by goltrpoat on 10 July 2008 at 3:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6382 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 8 10 July 2008 at 4:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
The following mnemonic popped into my head; I don't know if it's good. Some people in sports use the term 'ripped' to describe someone with extremely well-defined and large muscles. So, you could think of someone extremely like that (Schwarzenegger in his youth?) , and have the following imaginary dialog: "Is he ripped?" "No, he's not (just) ripped, he's TEARING!". ...... It's nonsense, but here's hoping it's useful nonsense. Or you could use something about 'tearing' down the road in an extremely fast car. "Fast... faster.... tearing!" Good luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| goltrpoat Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5937 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, German Studies: French, Latin | Message 3 of 8 11 July 2008 at 12:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Good call, thanks. The phonetic similarity between "tærin" and "tearing" didn't even occur to me for some reason. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| peterlin Tetraglot Groupie Poland peterlin.jzn.pl Joined 6358 days ago 54 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Polish*, Persian, English, Russian | Message 4 of 8 11 July 2008 at 8:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
1. "qali" doesn't end with alef nor vav nor a he, so your rule is not detailed enough. 2. "qali-ye gerantær" is "(the) more expensive carpet" 3. Why are you referring to the orthography anyway? Isn't it more straightforward to say "-ye" after vowels "-e" otherwise?
Your second example is of the reverse process: a adjective-from-noun derivation. Interestingly Persian employs the same suffix in both functions.
? Did you mean "can combine noun phrases into more complex noun phrases"? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| goltrpoat Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5937 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, German Studies: French, Latin | Message 5 of 8 11 July 2008 at 11:35am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Yeah, that's been bothering me. Bashiri transliterates it as "qali-ye," I should check another source.
Typo :).
Two reasons: Latinized orthography is relatively standardized, and ease of pronunciation does not determine correctness.
Good catch, thanks. The book says "form abstract nouns," should I instead think of "-í" as an "abstractness" modifier that can work both ways, when it applies?
Yes, of course :). For some reason, I couldn't think of the term when I wrote the post -- but these were meant to be shorthand notes, so I wasn't going for rigor. Basically, I made the assumption that by recursivity, I had to be able to form phrases like "that man's beautiful wife's sick uncle's big house," so it came as no surprise when that turned out to be the case. Side note -- is there an accepted way of doing nearly daily updates? I don't want to spam the forum with a ton of posts that say little more than "did X, learned Y, Z seems interesting." I could just hang a bunch of comments off a single post, but that's bound to get confusing to people who have already replied to it. P.S.: why isn't there a Persian section on forum językoznawców? :) All I could find was a single thread under inne indoeuropejskie. Edited by goltrpoat on 11 July 2008 at 11:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| goltrpoat Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5937 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, German Studies: French, Latin | Message 6 of 8 13 July 2008 at 12:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Update.
Covered a rather insane (for me) amount of vocabulary in the last few days. Anki claims the total is 169, which doesn't include a small set of words that I'm not actively maintaining (pronouns, words like in/an, dependent "to be" suffixes, etc), so I'm somewhere north of 200. Got to lesson 6 in Bashiri's book, which isn't quite as far as it sounds, -- the lessons seem to get longer and longer -- but still slightly ahead of schedule. I managed to finally get the "inner translator" to shut up when doing exercises, so I'm able to read material at my level without going back and forth between Farsi and English. I suspect it will still take me a while to get comfortable with the sentence structure (I'm having to think about it a fair bit when composing sentences), but that's a matter of practice. Lesson 6 finally gets into simple present, with simple past following in the next chapter. That's rather exciting, since it means I can start saying things that are a bit more useful than the inane neo-dadaist discourse that goes on in my head: "This expensive car is red. Yes, it is. I'm a small house! This tall green tree is... uh... tall. Yes, tall, and not short! And green. But who is this short blue man? Hello, Papa Smurf!" Except I think I said "Esmerfi Baba." So far, my idea seems to be working. It's surprising how much information can be retained while moving forward at a relatively breakneck speed, and I'm actually enjoying the process. The next two chapters should give me enough background to start trying to think in Persian as much as I can, which is a technique I used with German with good results. Note to self: I really need to start listening to spoken Persian while at work. My pronunciation is so bad that it's most likely unintelligible. Not a huge deal to me in the short term, but it seems like I'm creating extra work for myself for no good reason. Status: page 63. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| goltrpoat Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5937 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, German Studies: French, Latin | Message 7 of 8 13 July 2008 at 6:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Persian has interesting constructions involving the word šodæn (to become). Bolænd šodæn, literally "to become tall," seems to be used as "to get up." Daxel šodæn, similarly, seems to mean "to enter" ("daxel" = "inside").
Xasteh hastæm væli xandæn mixastæm, če bokonæm. Decisions, decisions. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| peterlin Tetraglot Groupie Poland peterlin.jzn.pl Joined 6358 days ago 54 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Polish*, Persian, English, Russian | Message 8 of 8 16 July 2008 at 7:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Sorry, have been very busy recently.
No need to double-check. It's the correct pronunciation. As I pointed out, the 'rule' wasn't detailed enough. And what I meant by this:
was that the rule IS: "ezafe is pronounced as /-e/ after consonants and /-ye/ after vowels" and that if you're talking about PRONUNCIATION (as opposed to orthography of ezafe) there's no need to refer to how a given word is written in Perso-Arabic script.
Well, my take is that there are a couple kinds of "-i" in Persian. One is an "abstractness" modifier which works both adjectives (sefid - white; sefidi - whiteness) and (some) nouns (nâmard 'coward'; nâmardi 'cowardice'). Another "-i" is a "relativizer" which forms adjectives from nouns (âb 'water' âbi 'blue'; qahve 'coffee'; qahve'i 'brown'; lahestân 'Poland' lahestâni 'Polish'). The division between nouns and adjectives is blurred - adjectives can be readily nominalised (thus, e.g. lahestâni means also 'Pole')
Your thread is your kingdom :)
Lack of interest. The forum is dying, and what little activity it has, is limited to Polish/Slavic philology, which is not a main interest of mine so to speak. You're more than welcome to post there, though. And if you want to engage in discussion about Persian with Polish iranists I can send you an invitation for grono.net, a social networking website. Not that the pace of the discussion there is overwhelming :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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